Editing Margaret Murray (section)

====Academic rejection====
Murray's work was increasingly criticised following her death in 1963, with the definitive academic rejection of the Murrayite witch-cult theory occurring during the 1970s.{{sfnm|1a1=Hutton|1y=1999|1p=362|2a1=Russell|2a2=Alexander|2y=2007|2p=154}} During these decades, a variety of scholars across Europe and North America – such as [[Alan Macfarlane]], Erik Midelfort, William Monter, Robert Muchembled, Gerhard Schormann, Bente Alver and Bengt Ankarloo – published in-depth studies of the archival records from the witch trials, leaving no doubt that those tried for witchcraft were not practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian religion.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=362}}
In 1971, the English historian [[Keith Thomas (historian)|Keith Thomas]] stated that on the basis of this research, there was "very little evidence to suggest that the accused witches were either devil-worshippers or members of a pagan fertility cult".{{sfn|Thomas|1971|p=514}} He stated that Murray's conclusions were "almost totally groundless" because she ignored the systematic study of the trial accounts provided by Ewen and instead used sources very selectively to argue her point.{{sfn|Thomas|1971|p=515}}

In 1975, the historian [[Norman Cohn]] commented that Murray's "knowledge of European history, even of English history, was superficial and her grasp of [[historical method]] was non-existent",{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=109}} adding that her ideas were "firmly set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould".{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=109}} That same year, the historian of religion [[Mircea Eliade]] described Murray's work as "hopelessly inadequate", containing "numberless and appalling errors".{{sfn|Eliade|1975|pp=152–153}} In 1996, the feminist historian [[Diane Purkiss]] stated that although Murray's thesis was "intrinsically improbable" and commanded "little or no allegiance within the modern academy", she felt that male scholars like Thomas, Cohn, and Macfarlane had unfairly adopted an androcentric approach by which they contrasted their own, male and methodologically sound interpretation against Murray's "feminised belief" about the witch-cult.{{sfn|Purkiss|1996|pp=62–63}}

{{Quote box
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|quote = That this "old religion" persisted secretly, without leaving any evidence, is, of course, possible, just as it is possible that below the surface of the moon lie extensive deposits of [[Stilton cheese]]. Anything is possible. But it is nonsense to assert the existence of something for which no evidence exists. The Murrayites ask us to swallow a most peculiar sandwich: a large piece of the wrong evidence between two thick slices of no evidence at all.
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|source = Jeffrey B. Russell and Brooks Alexander, 2007.{{sfn|Russell|Alexander|2007|p=42}}
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Hutton stated that Murray had treated her source material with "reckless abandon",{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=198}} in that she had taken "vivid details of alleged witch practices" from "sources scattered across a great extent of space and time" and then declared them to be normative of the cult as a whole.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=196}} Simpson outlined how Murray had selected her use of evidence very specifically, particularly by ignoring and/or rationalising any accounts of supernatural or miraculous events in the trial records, thereby distorting the events that she was describing. Thus, Simpson pointed out, Murray rationalised claims that the cloven-hoofed Devil appeared at the witches' Sabbath by stating that he was a man with a special kind of shoe, and similarly asserted that witches' claims to have flown through the air on broomsticks were actually based on their practice of either hopping along on broomsticks or smearing hallucinogenic salves onto themselves.{{sfn|Simpson|1994|pp=90–91}} Concurring with this assessment, the historian [[Jeffrey Burton Russell]], writing with the independent author Brooks Alexander, stated that "Murray's use of sources, in general, is appalling".{{sfn|Russell|Alexander|2007|p=154}} The pair went on to claim that "today, scholars are agreed that Murray was more than just wrong – she was completely and embarrassingly wrong on nearly all of her basic premises".{{sfn|Russell|Alexander|2007|p=154}}

The Italian historian [[Carlo Ginzburg]] has been cited as being willing to give "some slight support" to Murray's theory.{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=95}} Ginzburg stated that although her thesis had been "formulated in a wholly uncritical way" and contained "serious defects", it did contain "a kernel of truth".{{sfn|Ginzburg|1983|p=xix}} He stated his opinion that she was right in claiming that European witchcraft had "roots in an ancient fertility cult", something that he argued was vindicated by his work researching the {{lang|it|[[benandanti]]}}, an agrarian visionary tradition recorded in the [[Friuli]] district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries.{{sfn|Ginzburg|1983|p=xiii}} Several historians and folklorists have pointed out that Ginzburg's arguments are very different to Murray's: whereas Murray argued for the existence of a pre-Christian witches' cult whose members physically met during the witches' Sabbaths, Ginzburg argued that some of the European visionary traditions that were conflated with witchcraft in the Early Modern period had their origins in pre-Christian fertility religions.{{sfnm|1a1=Cohn|1y=1975|1p=223|2a1=Hutton|2y=1999|2p=378|3a1=Wood|3y=2001|3pp=46–47}} Moreover, other historians have expressed criticism of Ginzburg's interpretation of the {{lang|it|benandanti}}; Cohn stated that there was "nothing whatsoever" in the source material to justify the idea that the {{lang|it|benandanti}} were the "survival of an age-old fertility cult".{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=223}} Echoing these views, Hutton commented that Ginzburg's claim that the {{lang|it|benandanti}}'s visionary traditions were a survival from pre-Christian practices was an idea resting on "imperfect material and conceptual foundations".{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=278}} He added that Ginzburg's "assumption" that "what was being dreamed about in the sixteenth century had in fact been acted out in religious ceremonies" dating to "pagan times", was entirely "an inference of his own" and not one supported by the documentary evidence.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=277}}